


My Health For You

by downtheroadandupthehill, ryssabeth



Series: Glory Days [3]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Barely Legal, High School, M/M, Student/Teacher relations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-09
Updated: 2013-03-09
Packaged: 2017-12-04 21:45:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downtheroadandupthehill/pseuds/downtheroadandupthehill, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryssabeth/pseuds/ryssabeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe Grantaire doesn't want to be healthy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Health For You

He borrows a shirt from Courfeyrac’s closet without needing to ask, the next morning, because after so many impromptu sleepovers, asking for nearly anything has stopped being necessary. Courfeyrac’s parents stopped thinking the whole thing was a littleoffyears ago, and their son goes on enough dates with girls that they’re pretty sure Grantaire isn’t his type. He isn’t his type, not exactly, because Courfeyrac would never be legitimately interested in his best friend since elementary school, but neither of them are going to say no to some quick and easy helping-your-best-friend-get-off kind of action, either.

And he’d be lying if he said he didn’t put some extra-special deliberation into what he decides to borrow from Courfeyrac today, since it is his extra-special-with-Enjolras detention today. He settles for a forest green button-up that might even have once been his, and he only might have left it under Courfeyrac’s bed ages ago. But it fits him well, regardless, and he likes how he looks in green. Jeans are always reusable, and he slips into the ones he wore yesterday, even if he wishes he owned a tighter pair that could more easily scream _fuck me over your desk I am begging you._

But asking Courfeyrac if he can wear the tightest pair of pants he owns—that might be crossing some sort of line, and only invite even more teasing about his—as Courfeyrac puts it— _big date_ today.

There’s half a pot of coffee waiting for him in the kitchen, and a smirking Courfeyrac.

He wolf-whistles at him as he saunters in. “Good morning sunshine!”

“Fuck off.”

(Grantaire is not a morning person, and he wants to murder whoever decided high school ought to start at seven-thirty in the morning. But if he has to, for now he will settle for strangling his far-too-chipper-for-this-time-of-day best friend.)

“Mom made us some omelets. It’s in the fridge if you want some. You need your protein for your big day! Keep up your strength and stamina and what not.”

In response, Grantaire makes a noise something akin to a snarl, and Courfeyrac pours him a cup of coffee.

He takes it black. He’s never been one to sweeten things (it’s kind of like lying and he’s never liked lying—so he never chases down is booze and he never sweetens his coffee. And Grantaire is glad that Courfeyrac’s known that for as long as he’s had coffee to drink).

They take turns, stabbing at breakfast, thanks going unsaid for the assistance that had been given last night.

“So after he has his way with you over his desk,” Courfeyrac says through a mouthful of egg, “are you going to make him take you out to dinner?”

“Nope,” Grantaire swipes his tongue over his lips to catch some stray orange juice. “I don’t need anything classy—just a little bit of cardio over a desk.”

“A true gentleman,” Courfeyrac holds up his own glass of juice.

“Aren’t I always?”

-

They stop by Eponine’s house on the way to school. As usual, she’s perched out front on a dilapidated porch swing— _death trap_ , Grantaire always warns her—and she scurries into the backseat as soon as he pulls into the driveway.

“Alright, moochers,” Grantaire begins, although his tone is mildly cheerier than earlier, now that the caffeine has started to kick in. “You both realize you’re going to have to walk home, right?”

“Blah blah your big date, I know, I know. Stop using everything as an opportunity to bring it up,” Eponine says, and rolls her eyes. “It’s not like he might _actually_ bend you over his desk today. You might even have to _work_ for it.”

If he weren’t driving, he would tilt his head back and look at her, narrowing his eyes on her pretty face. But, alas. The things safety would have him do. So instead, he looks at the road, stretching before them, and says, “I’m totally inclined to work for it. I’m just not a big fan of throwing all my cards on the table in the first go. I’m hoping I look suitably fuckable today,” to which Courfeyrac agrees ( _“you do look acceptably dressed to be bent over a desk or taken against a chalkboard, who knows?”_ ). “But if I don’t, well, you know I can’t keep my mouth shut.”

The sound Eponine makes is a cross between a sigh and a laugh, a marvel of the human throat. But she doesn’t scold him anymore, not today, anyway. She’ll wait until after.

(And Grantaire doesn’t live for those moments—but he appreciates them.)

-

Classes pass too slowly. Grantaire sleeps through biology with Mr. Combeferre and daydreams during English Literature with Jehan—Mr. Prouvaire—but he insists his students call him by his first name instead. On occasion he and Courfeyrac trade mournful, longing stares from across the room, as Jehan had been quick to separate the two of them after Courfeyrac fell out of his seat laughing at some muttered joke of Grantaire’s on the very first day of class. But his teachers don’t expect much from Grantaire by this point so it’s pretty much a normal day.

(He might be glancing at the clock more often than usual, but besides that, definitely a normal day.)

At lunch, Marius joins them, and thank God for something to cheer Eponine up from her nearly permanent state of dourness. With Marius beside her, she doesn’t stop smiling—and even Courfeyrac has the tact not to comment on her pink cheeks, or how she keeps reapplying purple lip gloss—and she only falters slightly when Marius begins to moon over their school’s drop-dead gorgeous guidance counselor, Ms. Fauchelevent.

“She’s a _Ms._ ,” Marius sighs, gazing off in the distance. He’s barely touched his blue tray full of chicken nuggets. “So she could be single, right?”

“Probably goes by _Ms_ _._ to keep nosy high school kids the hell out of her business,” Grantaire comments. It’s an Eponine sort of thing to say, but since she resolutely will not get snappy with Marius, someone has to. He’s itching to slip out to his car for a quick cigarette, but he doesn’t want the smoke clinging to his clothes, and so he bites into an apple instead. (Courfeyrac’s dad packs them the best lunches, and takes the food pyramid very seriously.) “She’s got to be dating or married or something though. Too hot not to be,” he adds, through a mouthful of fruit.

“You just like blue-eyed blondes,” Courfeyrac laughs, and wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.

Grantaire groans and buries his face in his hands.

“What’s going on?” As usual, Marius is almost adorably oblivious. He makes Grantaire think of cartoon puppies who trip over their own ears, except maybe even cuddlier.

“I got detention with Enjolras after school,” Grantaire says, before Courfeyrac can begin a long-winded speech about first dates and true love and grace them with a performance of sappy-sweet Ingrid Michaelson songs.

“Oh.” Marius blinks. And then: “How do you think one goes about getting detention from a guidance counselor?”

“You could probably just make an appointment for something.” Grantaire shrugs, and he doesn’t flinch when Eponine kicks him under the table. (A practiced art, something that takes focus and dissociation and _ow Jesus why’d she do that twice_.)

They absently plan for Marius to see the guidance counselor (which will either never happen or he’ll botch it anyway) for the rest of lunch, though Eponine rolls her eyes when Courfeyrac’s suggestions take a turn for the lewd. (And Marius goes pink—and then red—and then scarlet.) The rest of the day passes by relatively quickly, which is a blessing,

But, also, he supposes, a curse. Because, for some reason, Government never goes by as quickly as he’d like. Daydreams, of course, never manage to help him any. Most days, it feels as if Enjolras wrings every second for all it’s worth, stretching everything out with the pull of his words and the magic of his mouth.

(Grantaire would kill to be wrung out by that mouth. Or his hands. Or sweet Jesus, Grantaire would kill to be wrung out by Enjolras, everything and anything that he’s ever been worth dripping upon the ground or a page or anywhere as long as Enjolras was the one that put him there.

That kind of thinking, perhaps, is unhealthy.)

But he’s an unhealthy young man, he is. It certainly isn’t healthy to want to be bent over a desk by your teacher or spread out upon graded or ungraded tests, having ink or graphite stuck to your skin by sweat. It’s not healthy to booze up at home or at your friend’s house. It’s not healthy to get off in the school bathroom.

( _I don’t want to be healthy._ )

Enjolras meets his eyes—and he’d been staring, he knows he’d been staring, and he knows that how he’d been staring can’t have been too decent—but a brow arches, as if there’s nothing questionable behind his eyes at all.

And then the bell rings, students scattering for their things to go home, or go to sports practice, or go smoke under the bleachers because it’s something people put in yearbooks. Grantaire stays put, smiling absently at the ruffle of his hair he gets from Courfeyrac. But, other than that—well. All he can do is stare.

 And wait.

When the desk in front of his is vacated, he slouches in his seat and puts his feet up. He leaves his textbook laying open, doodles filling its margins—even though it’s school-issued, and he’ll have to return it at the end of the year. He’s added penned-in facial hair and at least three scribbled penises to the picture of John Locke (the philosopher, not the television show character, though when it comes to important philosophers he likes to use Lost comparisons in his notes to keep them all straight, even if it didn’t work so well for him on his first essay exam two weeks ago. Red lines through all of his ramblings about Rousseau, the French woman who’s been living on the island for seventeen years, for example.)

Grantaire’s been through dozens of detentions, by this point in his high school career, and teachers tend to do them differently. Sometimes he has to clean desks or sweep floors, and once, his awful earth science teacher made him write lines. One hundred of them— _I will not throw rocks at Courfeyrac during class_.

He’s still staring at Enjolras, and now he folds his arms and tries to look mildly defiant.

Enjolras sits down at his desk, and his tie is loosened even more than it was yesterday. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and he leans back in his swivel chair. It’s odd to see him like this—at rest—when he’s almost always pacing around the room in some sort of tirade about the evils of any system that has capitalism’s tenants as its own. (This holds true for China, North America, and the European Union. The victims of these injustices are places like Mexico, India, and China, again.)

He seems annoyed, that Grantaire is still there, which doesn’t give Grantaire much hope for the next two hours he’s stuck here. His teacher sighs heavily through his nose. “Just, I don’t know, work on some homework or something. Use this time to do something useful. I won’t completely waste your time with nonsensical tasks.”

Grantaire snorts, cocking his head to the side. “Isn’t that your _job_ though? You get _paid_ to waste students’ time.”

Enjolras doesn’t rise to that, not really. Merely leans back in his chair and shuts his eyes, exposing the line of his throat in a way that is purely indecent. “Hardly,” he says, his Adam’s apple bobbing with his words. ( _Entirely. Indecent._ ) “I get paid to make sure you’re adequately prepared to change the world I release you into.”

(Grantaire rolls his eyes skyward—because there is no way Enjolras is _that_ much older than him, no matter how ridiculously ancient he sounds when he says things like that.)

“You say that like you intend to make us into people that’ll _do_ things.”

One eye opens, blue and narrowed. “That is my intention.”

Grantaire scoffs, bringing his feet down from his desk, leaning across it instead, as if Enjolras is right before him, close enough to breathe across his skin with a sneer. “Incredibly ambitious. And not even the _least_ bit surprising.”

“Oh?” Enjolras mimics him, shifting from the almost erotic position into a leaning one, elbows braced on his desk as he leans forward. (Grantaire wants to get out of his desk, cross the room and _grab_ him but—) “Enlighten me.”

“Gladly,” Grantaire rests his chin in his hands. “The way you want to make us little crusader drones for you, it’s really cute,” Enjolras’ nostrils flare at the word _drones_ , “but you assume that _any_ of us have the power to change anything. I had to break this to you, but people are a _lot_ smaller than you think they are.”

“Explain your reasoning,” Enjolras grits his teeth, Grantaire can hear it from here.

“There isn’t much to explain. Because it’s something obvious. Have you _seen_ the state of affairs most places are in? There is _nothing_ a group of students in your class for _graduating credit_ can do about _anything_ that’s going on. We barely decide what we _wear_ in the morning.”

“If _you_ dislike school so much, why not drop it and open up a seat for someone who wants to be here?” Enjolras is standing, eyes alight with something _furious_. And Grantaire wouldn’t have thought himself capable of inducing rage quite this quickly in another person. Or—he _would_ be thinking this if he weren’t angry on his own.

(Those words _hurt_. But of course they raise a fair question.)

Before he realizes it, Grantaire is on his feet, too, even though nose-to-nose like this Enjolras is still about four inches taller. Enjolras is breathing hard in frustration, because Grantaire is nothing if not _beyond fucking frustrating_ , and he wonders if this is how Enjolras would look and sound fucking Grantaire into the floor.

They’re close, now, so close and even though he’s mostly pissed and only slightly aroused, Grantaire feels his lips curl into his trademark smirk.

Because it would be  _so fucking easy_ to grab Enjolras by his collar and drag him into a bruising kiss and scrape his fingernails along his scalp and neck until they run out of thoughts and finally stop yelling at each other.

(At the curve of Grantaire’s mouth, something unrecognizable flickers across Enjolras’ face.

Maybe not entirely unrecognizable. He might have seen that something yesterday, when Grantaire had licked his lower lip and Enjolras had watched with more than passing interest.)

It would be easy to do, but Grantaire doesn’t.

Enjolras, however, _does_.


End file.
